Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain why it's been painted to resemble a zebra. Most dedicated machine vision models easily lock in on a boxy shape moving along a road. If anything, the stripes make the trucks easier to see.
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
Until drones deploy counter-blinkenlights. As someone who has built a realtime people tracker art installation in a disco: Stroboscopes are highly effective at confusing these models.
A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI).
Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights".
Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time.
No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
There's a limit to the number of targeting systems you can afford to deploy on a weapon, and there's the problem of reconciling their signals if their views of where the target is start to diverge.
"Counter-blinkenlights" are well-known as thermal flares, and more similar but as crude, [dazzlers] that blind the incoming rockets' sensors.
AFAIU, a dazzler is intended to blind the whole sensor, so home on dazzler would need specialized hardware, not only a software adjustment. (Replying to other messages in this thread)
But it's not a separate system, it's just a separate algorithm - it's software.
"No target" by AI but "target" by the "engage light sources" recognizer is still successful targeting.
"No target" versus "aim at anything not green or blue" is as well.
It's also a question of the speeds involved: a dazzler on high speed jet versus a high speed missile might cause a near miss which means hundreds of meters of actual separation. Diving drone vs. truck? Not so much.
Ya, things always evolve, and can't always be perfect, especially against adapting enemies. Strobes; ya - would be interesting to see what these do vs us, not tried.
Which is total overkill for the job. It very well might cost more to fire a Phalanx at the drone than the value of the drone. And the Phalanx has IIRC 20 seconds of fire before it needs extensive downtime for reloading.
They need something in the realm of a big automatic shotgun.
The way the US military works, throwing rolls of toilet paper at the drone from the deck of the shop is likely more expensive than the drone said toilet paper is hurling towards.
Depends on the target, some large ISR drones totally need big 20mm rounds but you scale the system down to machine guns and shotguns and build out integrated air defence systems with electronic actively scanning radar and sensors to detect and track the threats to kill
CIWS might be effective against fixed wing since they fly mostly in straight lines, it won’t work effectively against multirotors that can quickly change direction and maneuver around, now add swarm of them, and it will overwhelm CIWS. That of course, assuming it was detected which is a whole process by itself.
You’re talking about dodging bullets or shrapnel here. Source on that a multi rotor has that level of manoeuvrability while also carrying a lethal payload and enough battery for a viable engagement range?
/r/CombatFootage will show that even with strong explosive payloads the modern quads used by Ukraine are surprisingly mobile. They’re incredibly quick and manoeuvrable still, much to my surprise.
I do not actually suggest watching those videos, they are NSFL.
There’s a pretty big gulf between “very quick” and “capable of dodging air bursting autocannon rounds without sacrificing forward momentum”.
Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.
Right. There is no way a drone can dodge a stream of bullets. They essentially arrive instantaneously at the drone from its perspective. A bullet from these flies at 1km/s and there are a lot of bullets. The bigger problem is getting a good lock on the drone but if you can track it any AA cannon will turn it into mashed drone.
Pre-programmed evasion. Give the drone a flight path, it's expected to position itself randomly within a certain distance of that flight path. At longer ranges it's feasible to dodge a bullet that way (which is why soldiers do a highly evasive path against a sniper) and even at short ranges if you can beat the tracking system it doesn't matter if you can beat the bullet.
A CIWS can only fire at one direction at a time, so 2+1 drones has an extremely high chance of taking it out for around $2500 or less. CIWS is multiple magnitudes more expensive.
Modern dedicated AA gun systems claim multi-km engagement ranges against small drones, and 60 degree/second slew rates. A drone capable of beating that engagement time would be better described as a guided missile, and will certainly not cost $2500. The flaws in gun systems are in the cost required for good coverage, not their effectiveness against targets that do enter their engagement ranges.
You're thinking on a ship, which is great, but these need to be able to provide front line coverage where I becomes an expensive target for cheap munitions. It is not a great solution. It's a fine layer against other threat classes.
Terrain clutter quickly becomes a problem on the battlefield.
We're moving into the "waves of drones with orchestration" phase and expensive directional systems won't survive that, and cost on the drone swarms is still drastically lower. Won't matter if you added ten ciws and ten fire-finding radars.
Given that the drone is going on a one way trip, I imagine you'd want to use the cheapest hardware possible which would mean using the dumbest model you can get away with.
Depends on the value of the target. Costs Ukraine $918 to kill a Russian soldier[1] but if you’re using a fully offline automated swarm to destroy a petro system worth billions then what’s a few GPUs strapped to each one to run local models.
Your drone needs to be cheaper than what you're killing, so if your target profile is 50k+ USD and up, a $10000 even is fine (not that it would need to be even 10k).
Your oversimplification bakes in too many assumptions.
The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.
What matters most is the intangible military value of the item.
In too many situations people think simplistically about dollars, when what matters is invisible or intangible values. The hyperfocus on money is especially egregious among people that don't have much.
That's obviously not the only metric. The cheaper the drones are, and the less resources they need the more of them you can produce as a result. This is why cheaper weapons that can be produced at scale tend to be most effective.
This title scared me, not for myself but more thinking about how kids will probably need to learn these things next. We are such strange 'intelligent' creatures who have figured out everything but not to be at peace with each other.
After WW II German u-boat captains said they were never particularly bothered by dazzle camouflage. Ten years from now I have a feeling we'll get the same information from drone operators.
Dazzle isn't meant to hide. Dazzle is meant to confuse a human trying to estimate course and speed in order to send an unguided torpedo at it. You need to look at hit rates to judge effectiveness.
We don't have that data. All we have is conversation from former captains saying it didn't work.
EDIT: Also, IIRC, the most successful captains in the field didn't actually use the AOB method of determining the target's course. They would instead cross in front of the ship at a distance. When the ship's masts lined up they knew the ship was pointed directly at their current position and could calculate from their current bearing and the bearing to the target exactly what the target's course was.
In hindsight what the Brits should have done instead of odd paint jobs is offset their masts by a few degrees.
I have seen a few Erlkönigs (German term for camouflaged pre-production models) IRL. On the Autobahn, they are not that rare. You get to see one for every few thousand kilometers driven.
Back in the day, I had an early pre-release Xbox One Devkit and mouse and now I realize it was likely outfitted with Dazzle camouflage - but we just called it zebra.
Remember the "Black Mirror" episode "Metalhead"? (If not, check it out, no spoilers here.) I'm afraid we'll see something like this in the not-too-distant future.
Now, a squad of soldiers, or even just one experienced rifleman, would prob. dispatch of such a threat quickly. But against (at most poorly armed) civilians it would be an all too effective terror/area denial weapon.
Love that episode. The relentlessness of those drones is terrifying. I hope we civilians will have countermeasures against robots like those when the time comes...
Another interesting piece of fiction: Horizon Zero Dawn. AI robots armed to the teeth, fueled by biomass, capable of reproduction via onboard factories. They had to reset the planet.
If it actually becomes a problem, I start carrying my shotgun everywhere, but... Even in the US, most Americans aren't particularly good with a shotgun. Enough of us that most places could have a number of people that they just call. Wake up right now and get out because you might need to shoot something, but it's a dangerous job and I really hope that it never comes down to that.
Remember you are only seeing a selection of the thousands of times this has happened. The drone operating side will release more of the ones where it didn't work.
It does work at least sometimes. If it didn't work at all soldiers would not bother carrying the shotguns.
I have seen a few Ukrainian drone videos that cross over onto regular subreddits, and this subreddit is far more graphic. Do not take this 'NSFL' lightly.
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
This is an odd article that tries to elevate some random grunt in the field painting their truck white stripes to grand battlefield strategy in the face of autonomous AI killer drones. Neither are the latter real nor is the former actually in widespread use, and it obviously is not effective, not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.
>not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
You are mixing more things. There's lots of ISR drones flying around, from DJIs at 50-150m altitude to bigger fixed wing platforms at 1000-1500m. Their point is to find targets, do BDA and monitor, but not autonomously; it's guys sitting in Discord calls and entering data into BMS.
Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.
Half the time it is the nighttime and the things are in IR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000051 . You may still try to camouflage and decrease your IR visibility - stealth planes try to do it, and there are some IR-decreasing covers for tanks and people.
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
If you're really interested in this kind of thing, Grand Thumb on YouTube has a couple of videos about it. I think it was Dirty Civilian on YouTube that had a good video on how to prepare hide sites and the impact of using the right laundry detergent as to reduce or eliminate IR brightener chemicals, etc.
If only it was simple rage bait. As a member of this thing we call "civilization" I can't help but wonder how the hell we got to this point. #rhetorical
Very few voices were complaining about flying killer robots in and around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and more and more people seem comfortable with the status quo.
I guess things like fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles led the way. The future is Skynet.
“Attack drones” have been around for basically as long as civilisation itself. It’s just a recent development that they’ve been made out of metal and not meat. So we never got to this point, we’ve been at this point the entire time.
If anyone here is into drones, manufactures, ideas, or wants to either use their drone piloting skills or learn how to pilot drones. Ukraine is recruiting for positions.
Listed as official website. As a Ukrainian I can also confirm this is the website used on recruitment ads outside and it is legit.
Why does it have to be under gov.ua?
That is just a wikipedia page. Russia could have easily set that up. But now that we discussed it people can choose what to verify and what to believe. You know what they say, "Chem men'she znaesh,' tem loocheh"
Just beware that being part of the drone team isnt some comfy safe job far from danger, they are the most hated type of unit currently since they are deciding large part of this war (and any future war it seems). I see videos of ie glide bombs used by both sides targetting specifically positions of drone teams.
If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.
> fighting evil in this world is highly commendable
Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.
Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?
And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
> Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?
Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)
> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.
Russia emptied the prisons years ago. The able bodied men of Donetsk and Luhansk were rounded up and fed to grinder years ago as well. The wanton slaughter of their own people has been startling and depraved for their unending exuberance.
My evidence is waking up in the night from the sound of explosions in a city 150 km from the active front line, and then reading about a civilian building, or multiple buildings, hit in the morning. Sometimes even walking in person to see the aftermath.
I don't have any hard evidence that drones that hit Russian civilian buildings are even launched from Ukraine. What is known for a fact, is that they often belong to the same waves of attacks that hit industrial and military facilities. And for a fact, certain remote operators are responsible for that.
See, most will find my POV heavily tinfoil-headed, but try to understand it: I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
For example, I don't see any plausible explanation how drones with a radar cross-section of a Cessna are able to fly from Ukraine 1500-2000 km deep into Russia, other than either being turned the blind eye to by the Russian air defense, or straight up launched and controlled by entities within the country.
That it is pretty possible, can be understood by in depth reading on 1999 explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk which inaugurated Putin's rule, and peculiar details like that slip when Zhirinovsky spoke about the Volgodonsk explosion before the event proper. Also, the prevented explosion in Ryazan (look up "Ryazan sugar"). And by mere living in Russia and noticing things around.
There is always an SMS warning in advance of every wave of attacks, but drones fly unimpeded and it is only in the vicinity of towns and cities that the air defense kicks in, often sending "the debris" neatly into residential buildings.
No attacks on key infrastructure were ever made that would cut war logistics on both sides, both sides never attempted to attack any key (like, really key, not some sacrifice rooks or bishops) figure of its "enemy" Khomeini or Maduro style, in fact, nothing is ever made that should have been made in a real war. Only slow, deliberate, controlled smoldering. Fighting over strategically meaningless villages and towns with losses in many tens of thousands, only to back down and then try to recapture with same losses multiple times.
All in all it takes living here and boiling in it, nothing I wrote could be obvious or even entertained as possible to a foreigner who doesn't follow the news daily and only sees the broadest strokes presented by foreign mass media.
As to what the orchestrators benefit - it's multifaceted, but goes along the lines of slaughtering the battle-worthy passionaries who would otherwise prove dangerous to the globalist plans for CBDC, total digital control and surveillance in slavic countries, displacing them with meek migrant workers, terrorizing the remaining populace into complete apathy and acceptance of whatever new normals those plans set, training military AI on real-world bloody datasets, limiting the freedom of movement by deliberately created fuel shortages, which makes well for 15-minute cities, etc, etc per WEF, IMF, World Bank, Blackrock and whatever scum there is still in the shadow.
If Russian civilians stopped sleeping and took up arms against their government, then maybe this war could end. The people responsible are all members of the Russian government, and Russian people's apathy (or in many cases support for the war) enables them.
Let's see how you'll manage to stop your own governments from implementing total digital panopticon via Chat Control etc, from mongering wars half the equator away from your country, and everything else you won't like in what future holds for the West and the world in general.
I sincerely hope you'll be able to, thus proving that the people of the West are not as asleep at the wheel as Russians.
Polish estimates are closer to 20k, btw. And Polish forces executed thousands of Ukrainians as well during the same events.
Also don't forget russians executed 22k Polish prisoners of war in 1940 and lied about it for decades.
Germans killed millions of Polish citizens - but they are good people now, not like Ukrainians who are holding back russians? Russians who are casually invade neighbors once in a while and committing atrocities
I’m so fucking embarrassed to be Polish and hear this populism bullshit from Nawrocki and any other compromised russian shill.
You know who killed our people? The fucking russians. Remember when the bad guys came from Berlin? The other bad guys came from Moscow. Don’t forget that.
———
For anyone unsure what this throwaway account is talking about: when he says “not too long ago” in a discussion about a war that is happening literally today, he’s talking about 1943. If this isn’t a bad faith argument from an antagonist, then I don’t know what is.
> The probable result will be an arms race pitting increasingly sophisticated machine vision systems against cleverer and cleverer methods for fooling them.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.
A drone isnt terribly hard, or costly. It is a solved problem. The interesting bits are the software and even those are "easy" -- more so with "ai" in the aid of development. Ukraine isn't paying for "testing" either, they just send things to the front and try them against Russians.
Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain why it's been painted to resemble a zebra. Most dedicated machine vision models easily lock in on a boxy shape moving along a road. If anything, the stripes make the trucks easier to see.
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
Absolutely this will work, it's all over social media.
Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters.
[Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]
https://youtube.com/shorts/9VSHhx0nJPI?si=rxibNMYv0jKnAIEl
They’re looking for camouflaged military trucks.
What they’re not looking for is a convoy of Zambonis painted in Toronto Maple Leafs white and blue.
This. See https://9mothers.com
Until drones deploy counter-blinkenlights. As someone who has built a realtime people tracker art installation in a disco: Stroboscopes are highly effective at confusing these models.
Disco or death? It's not an easy choice. Which Bee Gees song is optimal? Does it help if I wear a leisure suit? Is the coke optional?
Stayin’ Alive - obviously
Upvoted: I love it when the old /. spirit lives on HN!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh1o_03ilQY
According to the fine article, a zebra patterned suit is recommended.
Yes but you're trying to identify people.
A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI).
Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights".
Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time.
No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
There's a limit to the number of targeting systems you can afford to deploy on a weapon, and there's the problem of reconciling their signals if their views of where the target is start to diverge.
"Counter-blinkenlights" are well-known as thermal flares, and more similar but as crude, [dazzlers] that blind the incoming rockets' sensors.
[dazzlers]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzler_(weapon)
AFAIU, a dazzler is intended to blind the whole sensor, so home on dazzler would need specialized hardware, not only a software adjustment. (Replying to other messages in this thread)
But it's not a separate system, it's just a separate algorithm - it's software.
"No target" by AI but "target" by the "engage light sources" recognizer is still successful targeting.
"No target" versus "aim at anything not green or blue" is as well.
It's also a question of the speeds involved: a dazzler on high speed jet versus a high speed missile might cause a near miss which means hundreds of meters of actual separation. Diving drone vs. truck? Not so much.
Ya, things always evolve, and can't always be perfect, especially against adapting enemies. Strobes; ya - would be interesting to see what these do vs us, not tried.
Well, not all killer drones run any kind of transformer model so...
Also "Civilian LLMs" use something on the order of 8 H200s, where a drone is effectively using a phone CPU from 2005.
what about the fiber-optic/Starlink line
Silence! Something something NPU at the edge hand-wave.
/s
LED display tiles showing the map driven over?
CIWS?
Close-In Weapon System
The Phalanx defense systems you see on naval vessels.
Yeah, just a smaller version, naval CIWS are designed to shoot down missiles.
Which is total overkill for the job. It very well might cost more to fire a Phalanx at the drone than the value of the drone. And the Phalanx has IIRC 20 seconds of fire before it needs extensive downtime for reloading.
They need something in the realm of a big automatic shotgun.
The way the US military works, throwing rolls of toilet paper at the drone from the deck of the shop is likely more expensive than the drone said toilet paper is hurling towards.
Depends on the target, some large ISR drones totally need big 20mm rounds but you scale the system down to machine guns and shotguns and build out integrated air defence systems with electronic actively scanning radar and sensors to detect and track the threats to kill
Tau
CIWS might be effective against fixed wing since they fly mostly in straight lines, it won’t work effectively against multirotors that can quickly change direction and maneuver around, now add swarm of them, and it will overwhelm CIWS. That of course, assuming it was detected which is a whole process by itself.
You’re talking about dodging bullets or shrapnel here. Source on that a multi rotor has that level of manoeuvrability while also carrying a lethal payload and enough battery for a viable engagement range?
/r/CombatFootage will show that even with strong explosive payloads the modern quads used by Ukraine are surprisingly mobile. They’re incredibly quick and manoeuvrable still, much to my surprise.
I do not actually suggest watching those videos, they are NSFL.
There’s a pretty big gulf between “very quick” and “capable of dodging air bursting autocannon rounds without sacrificing forward momentum”.
Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.
Right. There is no way a drone can dodge a stream of bullets. They essentially arrive instantaneously at the drone from its perspective. A bullet from these flies at 1km/s and there are a lot of bullets. The bigger problem is getting a good lock on the drone but if you can track it any AA cannon will turn it into mashed drone.
Pre-programmed evasion. Give the drone a flight path, it's expected to position itself randomly within a certain distance of that flight path. At longer ranges it's feasible to dodge a bullet that way (which is why soldiers do a highly evasive path against a sniper) and even at short ranges if you can beat the tracking system it doesn't matter if you can beat the bullet.
A CIWS can only fire at one direction at a time, so 2+1 drones has an extremely high chance of taking it out for around $2500 or less. CIWS is multiple magnitudes more expensive.
Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs.
P1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.
Modern dedicated AA gun systems claim multi-km engagement ranges against small drones, and 60 degree/second slew rates. A drone capable of beating that engagement time would be better described as a guided missile, and will certainly not cost $2500. The flaws in gun systems are in the cost required for good coverage, not their effectiveness against targets that do enter their engagement ranges.
That's great on a ship but eats shit with ground clutter and sub 1km engagement ranges with multiple targets.
Again, great on a ship.
The Army did a bunch of different testing on this recently.
You mean P1-SUN interceptor drones?
Yes sorry
For @YurgenJurgensen above:
You're thinking on a ship, which is great, but these need to be able to provide front line coverage where I becomes an expensive target for cheap munitions. It is not a great solution. It's a fine layer against other threat classes.
Terrain clutter quickly becomes a problem on the battlefield.
Great on ships or for a base defense layer.
I don’t think it’s a technical limitation that CIWS systems today only fire in one direction.
Wouldn't really improve things.
CIWS is just best for a different threat model.
We're moving into the "waves of drones with orchestration" phase and expensive directional systems won't survive that, and cost on the drone swarms is still drastically lower. Won't matter if you added ten ciws and ten fire-finding radars.
Bigger swarms have more counter battery risk
The difference is that a neural network you can fit on a drone is going to be a lot less capable than an LLM you can run on a desktop.
You can fit a Jetson Orin Nano on a winged drone. It has plenty enough power to run a vision model.
Not just winged drone, we have had jetson on far more smaller 7in multirotors, plus other boards for network etc.
Given that the drone is going on a one way trip, I imagine you'd want to use the cheapest hardware possible which would mean using the dumbest model you can get away with.
Depends on the value of the target. Costs Ukraine $918 to kill a Russian soldier[1] but if you’re using a fully offline automated swarm to destroy a petro system worth billions then what’s a few GPUs strapped to each one to run local models.
[1] https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-drone-chief-reveal...
Wait till you learn how much missiles cost.
Your drone needs to be cheaper than what you're killing, so if your target profile is 50k+ USD and up, a $10000 even is fine (not that it would need to be even 10k).
Your oversimplification bakes in too many assumptions.
The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.
What matters most is the intangible military value of the item.
In too many situations people think simplistically about dollars, when what matters is invisible or intangible values. The hyperfocus on money is especially egregious among people that don't have much.
> The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.
The cost is often proportional to the cost and complexity of making the item.
Yes I oversimplified, but it helps to put into context the cost delta of a patriot and a mini shahed.
Logistics, logistics logistics. Diversity of manufacturing location and suppliers.
Right now for example the US has 1-2 suppliers (and sometimes it's just another sub company) for critical weapon parts.
That's obviously not the only metric. The cheaper the drones are, and the less resources they need the more of them you can produce as a result. This is why cheaper weapons that can be produced at scale tend to be most effective.
Doesn't a fiber tether give its drone desktop-class computing?
Fiber tethered drones don't need to be AI controlled.
They can have AI enabled graphics in the goggles of the operator.
how else would you control 2M drones at the same time? Mechanical Turk? Or aerial fight with an enemy AI, thus much quicker reacting, drone.
A starlink tethered drone can have a (orbital) datacenter guiding it.
until it gets jammed that is https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/07/08/russia-has-found-way-...
Microdrones [and butterfly nets] https://m.xkcd.com/1523/
As a bonus it will also repel horse flies.
https://www.science.org/content/article/zebra-stripes-confus...
This title scared me, not for myself but more thinking about how kids will probably need to learn these things next. We are such strange 'intelligent' creatures who have figured out everything but not to be at peace with each other.
After WW II German u-boat captains said they were never particularly bothered by dazzle camouflage. Ten years from now I have a feeling we'll get the same information from drone operators.
The article says that its already known to not work against human drone pilots, its specifically targeting AI-piloted ones
Dazzle isn't meant to hide. Dazzle is meant to confuse a human trying to estimate course and speed in order to send an unguided torpedo at it. You need to look at hit rates to judge effectiveness.
We don't have that data. All we have is conversation from former captains saying it didn't work.
EDIT: Also, IIRC, the most successful captains in the field didn't actually use the AOB method of determining the target's course. They would instead cross in front of the ship at a distance. When the ship's masts lined up they knew the ship was pointed directly at their current position and could calculate from their current bearing and the bearing to the target exactly what the target's course was.
In hindsight what the Brits should have done instead of odd paint jobs is offset their masts by a few degrees.
It's not camouflage for ships, it's so it's harder to estimate the distance.
I understand, but like I said, it never really worked.
Twenty four years later I'm still looking for ways to evade the spider drones deployed by PreCrime in Minority Report.
Oh, so dazzle camouflage is back. I wonder if the more sophisticated "classic" patterns would work better. They certainly do for human observers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
Automobile manufacturers still use it for some new models in development - occasionally see photos on social media from passersby https://gizmodo.com/how-automakers-use-a-wwi-era-camo-techni...
I have seen a few Erlkönigs (German term for camouflaged pre-production models) IRL. On the Autobahn, they are not that rare. You get to see one for every few thousand kilometers driven.
Back in the day, I had an early pre-release Xbox One Devkit and mouse and now I realize it was likely outfitted with Dazzle camouflage - but we just called it zebra.
There are things to learn from the drone conflict in ukraine, eg drone netting, but I don't think neo dazzle camouflage is one of them
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-stunned-uk-military-...
Remember the "Black Mirror" episode "Metalhead"? (If not, check it out, no spoilers here.) I'm afraid we'll see something like this in the not-too-distant future.
Now, a squad of soldiers, or even just one experienced rifleman, would prob. dispatch of such a threat quickly. But against (at most poorly armed) civilians it would be an all too effective terror/area denial weapon.
Love that episode. The relentlessness of those drones is terrifying. I hope we civilians will have countermeasures against robots like those when the time comes...
Another interesting piece of fiction: Horizon Zero Dawn. AI robots armed to the teeth, fueled by biomass, capable of reproduction via onboard factories. They had to reset the planet.
If it actually becomes a problem, I start carrying my shotgun everywhere, but... Even in the US, most Americans aren't particularly good with a shotgun. Enough of us that most places could have a number of people that they just call. Wake up right now and get out because you might need to shoot something, but it's a dangerous job and I really hope that it never comes down to that.
There's a video of a Finnish clay target champion taking on drones with a shotgun.
The first one gets him because he's unfamiliar with their flight paths.
After that he does better but it clearly shows that you'd have to be an expert to take down a drone with a shotgun.
Also there's a lot of air inside a shotgun spread, so even an on target shot may fail to disable a drone.
There is video out of Ukraine of Russians with shotguns shooting at drones. It’s not very effective.
Remember you are only seeing a selection of the thousands of times this has happened. The drone operating side will release more of the ones where it didn't work.
It does work at least sometimes. If it didn't work at all soldiers would not bother carrying the shotguns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_shotguns_against_drones https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-soldiers-best-chance...
> https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drone...
You can't hide from drones. Attach quadrf to your drone and now you can see through walls.
I wonder if that works with drones not using Wifi frequencies, like 900MHz control link and 3.3GHz video?
Anything active eliminates stealth.
Think we're at a point where you could make a 2A argument for jammers
You don't
/r/CombatFootage (NSFL)
I have seen a few Ukrainian drone videos that cross over onto regular subreddits, and this subreddit is far more graphic. Do not take this 'NSFL' lightly.
A tip from a 2024 Google paper[0]:
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
[0] https://research.google/blog/restoring-speaker-voices-with-z...
This is an odd article that tries to elevate some random grunt in the field painting their truck white stripes to grand battlefield strategy in the face of autonomous AI killer drones. Neither are the latter real nor is the former actually in widespread use, and it obviously is not effective, not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
The evidence seems to be coming out to support the latter.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjp0n7rn41o
Yes, media see a snapdragon running a YOLO and go off writing "AI apocalypse autonomous killer drones" articles.
See it for yourselves: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2071537561059692956
Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.
If it works, who cares how it's made?
Because how it’s made and functions is useful information for dealing with it when they’re trying to attack you?
>not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
You are mixing more things. There's lots of ISR drones flying around, from DJIs at 50-150m altitude to bigger fixed wing platforms at 1000-1500m. Their point is to find targets, do BDA and monitor, but not autonomously; it's guys sitting in Discord calls and entering data into BMS.
Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.
Half the time it is the nighttime and the things are in IR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000051 . You may still try to camouflage and decrease your IR visibility - stealth planes try to do it, and there are some IR-decreasing covers for tanks and people.
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
If you're really interested in this kind of thing, Grand Thumb on YouTube has a couple of videos about it. I think it was Dirty Civilian on YouTube that had a good video on how to prepare hide sites and the impact of using the right laundry detergent as to reduce or eliminate IR brightener chemicals, etc.
Most drones use thermal cameras, this camouflage rather does not help.
Great now we all need to wear mylar blankets under our ghillie suits now.
If only it was simple rage bait. As a member of this thing we call "civilization" I can't help but wonder how the hell we got to this point. #rhetorical
Very few voices were complaining about flying killer robots in and around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and more and more people seem comfortable with the status quo.
I guess things like fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles led the way. The future is Skynet.
Like with many issues, people will only complain when it affects them directly. And by then it's usually too late to do anything about it.
“Attack drones” have been around for basically as long as civilisation itself. It’s just a recent development that they’ve been made out of metal and not meat. So we never got to this point, we’ve been at this point the entire time.
Why do talented engineers keep going to work for these companies and building it?
In the example of Ukrainians, to protect their families and loved ones.
Why do talented engineers keep going to work for FAANG?
I dont know, I wish I did.
Because otherwise the opponent absolutist regime would be the only one to wield the tech.
It's absolutely ridiculous that this needs to be stated.
until you are on the wrong side of an absolutist regime I guess
How about lots of similarly painted cheap decoys!?
If anyone here is into drones, manufactures, ideas, or wants to either use their drone piloting skills or learn how to pilot drones. Ukraine is recruiting for positions.
https://usforces.army/en
Who owns and operates this site? It is not a military or government website of the United States of America.
These [1][2] are the websites for Ukraine's military.
[1] - https://mod.gov.ua/en
[2] - https://www.zsu.gov.ua/en
Unmanned system forces, can't you read?
It's a Ukrainian site with English selected. You couldn't figure that out?
Unmanned system forces
Who is that? What is their official page under gov.ua?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_Systems_Forces_of_Ukr...
Listed as official website. As a Ukrainian I can also confirm this is the website used on recruitment ads outside and it is legit. Why does it have to be under gov.ua?
Why does it have to be under gov.ua?
That is just a wikipedia page. Russia could have easily set that up. But now that we discussed it people can choose what to verify and what to believe. You know what they say, "Chem men'she znaesh,' tem loocheh"
This seems like it caters mostly to Ukrainians no?
No, you can join as well. Even russians can join, however there are strict background checks.
Just beware that being part of the drone team isnt some comfy safe job far from danger, they are the most hated type of unit currently since they are deciding large part of this war (and any future war it seems). I see videos of ie glide bombs used by both sides targetting specifically positions of drone teams.
If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.
Like sharpshooters, the drone operators are usually executed instead of being taken POW.
And drone operators aren't taken prisoner either as a rule.
> fighting evil in this world is highly commendable
Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.
Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?
And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
> Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?
Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)
> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.
Russia emptied the prisons years ago. The able bodied men of Donetsk and Luhansk were rounded up and fed to grinder years ago as well. The wanton slaughter of their own people has been startling and depraved for their unending exuberance.
The minorities from the regions came next. Then came the allies from the antiimperialist block days. Now they reach for the gullible of the world.
My evidence is waking up in the night from the sound of explosions in a city 150 km from the active front line, and then reading about a civilian building, or multiple buildings, hit in the morning. Sometimes even walking in person to see the aftermath.
I don't have any hard evidence that drones that hit Russian civilian buildings are even launched from Ukraine. What is known for a fact, is that they often belong to the same waves of attacks that hit industrial and military facilities. And for a fact, certain remote operators are responsible for that.
See, most will find my POV heavily tinfoil-headed, but try to understand it: I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
For example, I don't see any plausible explanation how drones with a radar cross-section of a Cessna are able to fly from Ukraine 1500-2000 km deep into Russia, other than either being turned the blind eye to by the Russian air defense, or straight up launched and controlled by entities within the country.
That it is pretty possible, can be understood by in depth reading on 1999 explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk which inaugurated Putin's rule, and peculiar details like that slip when Zhirinovsky spoke about the Volgodonsk explosion before the event proper. Also, the prevented explosion in Ryazan (look up "Ryazan sugar"). And by mere living in Russia and noticing things around.
There is always an SMS warning in advance of every wave of attacks, but drones fly unimpeded and it is only in the vicinity of towns and cities that the air defense kicks in, often sending "the debris" neatly into residential buildings.
No attacks on key infrastructure were ever made that would cut war logistics on both sides, both sides never attempted to attack any key (like, really key, not some sacrifice rooks or bishops) figure of its "enemy" Khomeini or Maduro style, in fact, nothing is ever made that should have been made in a real war. Only slow, deliberate, controlled smoldering. Fighting over strategically meaningless villages and towns with losses in many tens of thousands, only to back down and then try to recapture with same losses multiple times.
All in all it takes living here and boiling in it, nothing I wrote could be obvious or even entertained as possible to a foreigner who doesn't follow the news daily and only sees the broadest strokes presented by foreign mass media.
As to what the orchestrators benefit - it's multifaceted, but goes along the lines of slaughtering the battle-worthy passionaries who would otherwise prove dangerous to the globalist plans for CBDC, total digital control and surveillance in slavic countries, displacing them with meek migrant workers, terrorizing the remaining populace into complete apathy and acceptance of whatever new normals those plans set, training military AI on real-world bloody datasets, limiting the freedom of movement by deliberately created fuel shortages, which makes well for 15-minute cities, etc, etc per WEF, IMF, World Bank, Blackrock and whatever scum there is still in the shadow.
If Russian civilians stopped sleeping and took up arms against their government, then maybe this war could end. The people responsible are all members of the Russian government, and Russian people's apathy (or in many cases support for the war) enables them.
Let's see how you'll manage to stop your own governments from implementing total digital panopticon via Chat Control etc, from mongering wars half the equator away from your country, and everything else you won't like in what future holds for the West and the world in general.
I sincerely hope you'll be able to, thus proving that the people of the West are not as asleep at the wheel as Russians.
Only the russians are targeting civilians.
The Ukrainian executed 100k Polish civilians not too long ago, but I'm sure now they are angels.
Polish estimates are closer to 20k, btw. And Polish forces executed thousands of Ukrainians as well during the same events.
Also don't forget russians executed 22k Polish prisoners of war in 1940 and lied about it for decades.
Germans killed millions of Polish citizens - but they are good people now, not like Ukrainians who are holding back russians? Russians who are casually invade neighbors once in a while and committing atrocities
You’re not a Konfederacja voter by any chance?
I’m so fucking embarrassed to be Polish and hear this populism bullshit from Nawrocki and any other compromised russian shill.
You know who killed our people? The fucking russians. Remember when the bad guys came from Berlin? The other bad guys came from Moscow. Don’t forget that.
———
For anyone unsure what this throwaway account is talking about: when he says “not too long ago” in a discussion about a war that is happening literally today, he’s talking about 1943. If this isn’t a bad faith argument from an antagonist, then I don’t know what is.
Machine Learning CAPTCHA https://m.xkcd.com/2228/
Username checks out :)
> The probable result will be an arms race pitting increasingly sophisticated machine vision systems against cleverer and cleverer methods for fooling them.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.
How is it a NATO-russia war of NATO is not taking a participation?
You can call it NATO-Iran, or NATO-NKorea war as well.
Ukraine-Nkorea war? At least there were direct contacts between their forces.
Indeed, the key low-cost mass-produced drone tech is Ukrainian, and NATO currently sorely lacks comparable capabilities.
It's the really long range that have always needed an autonomous end phase
Slaughterbots: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU
"stay inside" scare... from late 2019...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
Except the Ukraine kind of went out and built it.
People in this thread keep talking about DJI, and off the shelf US drones.
Ukraine has move so far beyond commercial products (but still in use) that it's laughable.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/ukraines-drones-can-n...
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/60152
A drone isnt terribly hard, or costly. It is a solved problem. The interesting bits are the software and even those are "easy" -- more so with "ai" in the aid of development. Ukraine isn't paying for "testing" either, they just send things to the front and try them against Russians.
Prescient.
This film predated the Ukraine war, and it felt like fiction six years ago.
This is absolutely coming.
The government is concerned about who might print a 3D gun, but this is the real danger.
The Ukraine war started in 2014.
Predated the widespread use of small drones in Ukraine
True, but I think OP's core message is that the movie pre-dated the broader invasion and subsequent drone-heavy combat.
Censorship is alive and well on this cursed site
How so?
Any comment about Gaza getting flagged in under a minute
Flagging irrelevant comments isn't censorship...
Shalom!